Awesome Techs

I have seen lots and lots of tutorials on this, but none of them worked for me as it was never explained well. Now I did this and I am booting Ubuntu 9.10 and Mac (iAKTOS v7) fine. So I have the right and responsibility to publish this.

Step 1:

Now the first step will be downloading the image for Mac. I used iATKOS v7 as it was the first one I found while I was searching for it. So if you don’t want to take your effort and search it, just download it from here.

Magnet URL magnet link)

If the above link is not working – copy This ->

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:ce66138e8e39b9f42377002d879a485d62cabd33&dn=iATKOS_v7&tr=http%3A%2F%2Fdenis.stalker.h3q.com%3A6969%2Fannounce

Step 2:

After download completes, just  burn it to a disk. (The disk will be bootable)

Step 3:

Now you will have to create a primary partition and assign  boot flag to the partition. But creating a primary partition will defer according to the OS you are using, but basically it all are the same.

So If you are using

Windows 7 or Windows Vista

Right click My computer and select manage. Then select disk management under Storage. Now check if you have a free primary partition already. You won’t be having it in most cases. So you are going to create it now. First make a free space around 15 GB in any of the primary partitions, and Shrink the volume with free space to get a free unallocated partition of ~15GB. Then you create a new primary partition with Quick-format option and Compression enabled. Give it a proper Label, so that you will easily recognize it while installing MAC. Now right click it and make that partition Active.

Any Linux

Install GParted. Open it. Then create a primary partition with NTFS filesystem. Make it bootable( you can find the option to make it bootable in manage flags option in the right click menu for a partition).

Step 4:

Put the iATKOS v7 DVD in your dvd drive and boot from it. Before pressing “I Agree” just read the whole thing. Its not a copyright info junk. Its the Read Me for iAtkos installation. If you need, just save it by the option given to your hard-disk. Now click I Agree. Now Open the Disk Utilities and then you will find the Mac Os Primary partition you just created from your operating system. Right Click on that and select Erase. In the erasing dialogue box, select file system as Mac extended File system. And now click on erase. After erase completes,  Exit the disk utility from the utility menu which will be there on the left top corner of you monitor. Now you will be able to select the destination. Select it and click on next. Now you will see an advances/ customize button on the left bottom side of the dialogue box. Click it and you will be presented with all the drivers. Most of the systems will work with the default selection, but some does not. Here you will have to be careful. In my opinion, just select the needed drivers from network, and systems. (Only needed drivers). If you have read the I Agree part fully, you will be able to make selection without any confusion. And you may have to select the PS/2 mouse and Keyboard driver from the system drivers sub-menu, or else your keyboard and mouse may not work. Now after making customization just click ok and proceed with install. After the installation completes restart the system. Check if the Mac is working fine. If its not working you might have done something wrong with the driver selection.

By the way, be sure read the Read Me from the I Agree part. This is a must. If you messed up your system, it not my responsibility.Just take your time and read it. Or play with it some time, with all the combination of the driver sections. Now I will tell you about the Dual Boot Part.

Step 5:

This is the easiest part. Just boot into a Ubuntu 9.10 live Cd/DvD. Mount the partition with Linux installation.

Your Ubuntu partition is now mounted. You will need to use the Terminal.

Double check if your partition is correct.

mount | tail -1

You will see an output similar to this:

/dev/sda2 on /media/0d104aff-ec8c-44c8-b811-92b993823444 type ext4 (rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=devkit)

Use Tab Completion in Terminal to complete the path.

To make sure this is indeed the Ubuntu boot partition, run ls /media/0d104aff-ec8c-44c8-b811-92b993823444/boot, substituting 0d104aff-ec8c-44c8-b811-92b993823444 with your volume’s UUID from before, which should output something like this:

config-2.6.18-3-686      initrd.img-2.6.18-3-686.bak  System.map-2.6.18-3-686
grub                     lost+found                   vmlinuz-2.6.18-3-686
initrd.img-2.6.18-3-686  memtest86+.bin

If what you have is not similar, unmount it and try another partition.

Now that everything is mounted, we just need to reinstall GRUB by specifying the correct directory and the correct drive name:

sudo grub-install --root-directory=/media/0d104aff-ec8c-44c8-b811-92b993823444 /dev/sda

If you get BIOS warnings try:

sudo grub-install --root-directory=/media/0d104aff-ec8c-44c8-b811-92b993823444 /dev/sda --recheck

Replace /dev/sda with the location you want to install GRUB on.

If all went well, you should see something like this:

Installation finished. No error reported.
This is the contents of the device map /boot/grub/device.map.
Check if this is correct or not. If any of the lines is incorrect,
fix it and re-run the script `grub-install'.

(hd0)   /dev/sda

Now in terminal, just type,

 sudo update-grub

If you see your Mac OS Partition label in the output, its ok. Now if you reboot , Mac will load.

But still again if Mac doesn’t load don’t panic. We have one more way to do this.

Download This File: PC_EFI_v80

Extract it, and copy the boot_v8 file to/boot, use this command to do that,

sudo cp /pc_efi_v80/boot_v8 /boot

Now again enter the command:

sudo update-grub

Now reboot the system, while shutting down, remove the live CD, and press enter.( You will be asked to do so, so do it!)

Now there will be an option to boot from MAC if you done all the Steps in this guide.

Step 6:

Boot From MAC

Comments, feel free to ask any doubts and put any comments unless its spam.

config-2.6.18-3-686      initrd.img-2.6.18-3-686.bak  System.map-2.6.18-3-686
grub                     lost+found                   vmlinuz-2.6.18-3-686
initrd.img-2.6.18-3-686  memtest86+.bin

sudo grub-install --root-directory=/media/0d104aff-ec8c-44c8-b811-92b993823444 /dev/sda

sudo grub-install --root-directory=/media/0d104aff-ec8c-44c8-b811-92b993823444 /dev/sda --recheck

Installation finished. No error reported.
This is the contents of the device map /boot/grub/device.map.
Check if this is correct or not. If any of the lines is incorrect,
fix it and re-run the script `grub-install'.

(hd0)   /dev/sda

Changing the login screen of ubuntu 9.10 is somewhat different and complicated compared to other versions of ubuntu. But still we can change it the way we need it to behave. For this we will have to do some steps. Let me explain those steps here.

1. Logout of your current session and return to the GDM
2. Switch to the tty command line prompt using Ctrl-Alt-F1
3. Login using your normal login/password
4. at the command line prompt type: export DISPLAY=:0.0
5. then type: sudo -u gdm gnome-control-center
6. Switch back to the gdm screen using CTRL+ALT-F7
7. The gnome-control-center should be loaded. Use it to configure your GDM.
8. Click on the Appearances icon, in appearances you can change your GDM’s font, theme and background image.
9. Close the gnome-control-center and login normally.

These are the steps. Here in the gnome control center you can lot more than just changing the login screen.

Have any doubts? feel free to ask in comments.

credit:Ubuntu Mini

Well first let me make it clear that, I am not using wine or any other syncing tools for Linux. I am actually using Virtual Box.

So First install the non GPL version of Virtual Boz in you linux. Then just install Windows Xp in this Virtual Box. You can read the article for setting up Virtual Box Here.

After setting up windows XP properly install itunes 8.2. You can download Itunes 8.2 from here.

Then Plugin your Ipod or Iphone to your system. Then for your guest to recognize the ipod/iphone you will have to make a change in the Virtual Box. In the virtual box guest window frame, You can see a USB icon. See the Pic below.

Right Click that icon and select the ipod/iphone Now If you open the itunes in The guest OS you will see the Ipod/Iphone is connected status.

Now if you need all the Music /  Video / Picture files to be accessed by from Windows XP, you need to create the shared folder in Virtual Box settings. For this select the Devices and Shared Folders from the top menu in the Guest Window. Then add the Muic/Video/Picture folder there.

Now for the ease of use, you can map these as network drives. For this Just right click on the “My Computer” in Windows XP and select Map Network Drive, and then browse to the shared “vboxsvr” folders. Also select a suitable Drive name. Now you can see you favorite media folders as Drives in your My Computer.

If you have done till this, you can just use the iTunes as you were using it in the Windows Machine.

Editing the boot menu in Grub version 2 is a little bit different compared to Grub version 1. The problem is Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 comes with Grub 2. That means a fresh install of Ubuntu 9.10 changes your old grub to version 2. And version 2 of Grub dont have menu.lst. Menu.lst is the file we have to edit if we want to change something permanently in the bootmenu.

Instead of menu.lst Grub V2 uses grub.cfg. The path normally is

/boot/grub/grub.cfg

NOTE: you can use the grub-mkconfig utility to generate a grub.cfg file for you. Other operating systems can be detected and will be added to the configuration only if os-prober is also installed. os-prober is currently only avaible in Debian and Ubuntu.

GRUB 2 uses new bashish scripting language that is used to build menus. At startup file grub.cfg will be read and executed.

Please note that partition numbering has been changed to start from 1 (in grub legacy it started from 0).

Example menu entrys can be found in docs/grub.cfg in the source or in the Debian/Ubuntu package in /usr/share/doc/grub-pc/examples/grub.cfg.

Here is an simple example:

# Timeout for menu
set timeout=10

# Set default boot entry as Entry 0
set default=0

# Entry 0 - Load Linux kernel
menuentry "My Linux Kernel on (hd0,1)" {
    set root=(hd0,1)
    linux /vmlinuz root=/dev/hda1
    initrd /initrd
}

# Entry 1 - Chainload another bootloader
menuentry "Chainload my OS" {
    set root=(hd0,3)
    chainloader +1
}

PS: The improper editing of the file grub.cfg can leave you with an unbootable system.

The first reason for any normal computer user to use Windows 7 is its cooler look and faster performance. Extended support for themes, desktop gadgets, sidebar etc are helping windows 7 to look nice. The people who uses linux for every day use is increasing day by day, but still its not even close to the numbers of windows users. The main reason is being the ugly user interface, which is not the truth but what most people think.

Now in a KDE desktop, for example Kubuntu, all these effects which windows 7 boasts to have, are there. But what about the Gnome Lovers, so thats why I am writing this blog post today. Gnome can be made lot more cooler than even windows 7 with the use of some tools. Cairo-Dock/Glx-Dock is on of this kind application.

With Cairo Dock we can make the Gnome desktop look like anything we want. The best feature of this cairo-dock is, it is customizable to very high extend. Cairo-Dock is a bar to launch applications hosted (or dock, to the way Mac OS X) incorporating in its latest versions, management of plugins as desklets (or widgets) directly displayed on the desktop of user icons such “interactive”. Incorporated by Fabrice Rey (aka Fabounet) and developed on Ubuntu (also works on other distributions and desktop environments Linux in 32 or 64 bit) it allows quick launching favorite applications directly from the user’s desktop.  A manager of transparency as Compiz Fusion, Beryl, Compiz or Metacity associated with xcompmgr is necessary.  The dock also works under XFCE (with the composite manager xfwm4 or Compiz), and normally with KDE since Kwin manages the composition display.

You can find the installation instruction HERE. Information for Ubuntu Users are available HERE.

PS: If you are experiencing any issues after the install, just right click and quit the application and then launch it by using the -c switch. like cairo-dock -c.

Also if you are using Radeon cards, you may want to add the boot parameter radeon.modeset=1.

If you got any doubts ask me, through he comments. Here are some desktops which uses Cairo-Dock.

Since we all love to do things in a simple way, I introduce you LAMP Server. LAMP is Linux Apache MySql PHP server.

It’s useful if you want to set up a private web development environment. Perhaps you want to develop your own WordPress theme. If you are developing websites and experimenting, it’s nice to do it in the privacy of your own computer, rather than out on the public internet.

Install LAMP

The Ubuntu developers have created a very easy way to install a LAMP server on an existing system. It’s all kicked off with this one simple terminal command.

sudo apt-get install lamp-server^

Note: Please make note of the caret (^) in the above command, it’s not a typo, it’s required to make the command work.